A printer is fundamentally uninteresting. You stick it on the table and - oh look! - it prints. Or, at least, so I told a printer product manager at Brother just over a decade ago. With more politeness than the assertion merited, he explained, as if to a small and particularly stupid young boy, that they weren't all the same: companies needed printers of different sizes, network printers, large format printers. He didn't say photo printers at the time but there's a good chance he'd have done so had we been talking days rather than years ago.

Indeed, many people regard the printer as an essential but dull add-on to a system purchase, and small businesses, and home businesses in particular, end up paying too much per printed page. The fact is that a printer is as much a piece of a system as anything else and it needs selection with as much care. It's a strategic investment, after all. And the key to getting it right is in thinking about the application it's going to be serving.

The standalone printer

Even what might be considered the basic, standalone printer that simply prints the page and is attached to a single computer, comes with a number of options people may consider confusing. The temptation is to go for the cheapest, but in the case of printers more than in any other computer component the total cost of ownership will bear little relation to the cost of acquisition - otherwise nobody would buy laserjets.

And the reason they buy the more expensive equipment is that the running costs - the frequency with which the toner needs replacing being only one - are lower for laser printers. Never mind that they cost at least twice as much as the heavier-duty counterparts. One company that is acutely aware of this is Sharp, which has just launched its AR-C260, which is colour and mono and aims to bring down the cost of colour printing if not of colour printers (it costs £13,495). Sharp's belief is that high quality colour printing has been restricted to marketing and design departments, whereas the new average cost per page makes it affordable more widely. Optional add-ons enable the customer to network it if they wish and it's designed to be a low-maintenance model.

The networked printer

There are two views on network printing. The first is that if your company's computers are going to be networked and then all switched on at the same time, then any printer can be a network printer. Just install the software on each computer, or get the network administrator to do it, and everyone in the network can print from one computer as long as their system knows to which computer the printer is attached. The other view is that not all of the computers will be on all the time, and if the one with the printer attached breaks down, the other computers looking for "Laserjet on Fred's PC" will fail to find it and you'll get a bottleneck of data.

The answer to this difficulty is addressed by most manufacturers by putting a network interface in the shape of an ethernet card and port on to the back of the printer. The Oki C5000 series makes the most of this idea; the router on the network then recognises the printer as another PC, and you don't have to worry about which computers are on or otherwise. The cost differential means that if you have a network of only three or four PCs, you'll be just as well off with a standalone printer and software drivers on all of the other systems.

Large printing

All of the above are fine when your basic need is for what we might call "ordinary" printing: that's on to A4 paper, which would account for most of the print workload in most offices. But not all departments work in that way. Requirements for A3 and larger print jobs exist, which is why Hewlett-Packard spent a lot of its time at the CeBit computer show this year making a noise about its DesignJet 120. This is a large-format printer that boasts the ability to print anything a company's going to want, from postcards to posters. It has an ordinary paper tray for the postcards and A4 stuff but it will happily run to printing A2-sized documents as well.

As you'd expect from a printer aimed at this sort of environment, it has a lot of other bells and whistles: a fast ethernet connection for attachment to networks, high-resolution colour settings that are proprietary to HP so that the posters will come out looking professional, and calibration so that the colour output is consistent. And of course you'll pay for it: the price is £955. But looking on the bright side, it means you can work right up to deadline on a design project for a client and just print the samples on demand.

There are other innovations appearing in the printing world. Ordinary networking isn't exciting enough; there are printers with wireless Bluetooth networking that can accept data from a hand-held computer - perfect if you're on the road and using an iPaq or Palm to present to customers.

Frequent users of digital cameras, such as estate agents, will no doubt gladly pay the extra for a photo printer. This doesn't refer to the quality of the print, more to the fact that you can plug the camera straight into it. Image quality will depend on the paper as much as the printer.

And the space-conscious will continue to note the developments in the multifunction area: printers that double as faxes, scanners and photocopiers, and sometimes answering machines as well. The downside of these used to be that they would use technology that was a year or so out of date and combine them into one machine. For most purposes, looking at the quality of print that was available a year or so ago, this doesn't matter as much as it used to.

Mind you, it's equally true that, getting back to where we came in, if you get a printer and stick it on the table, it'll print, which isn't desperately interesting. But then "useful" doesn't always mean "radically different".

All printers mentioned above are intended as examples of what's available rather than recommendations of the best on the market.

Help panel
Choosing the right printer

· Ask yourself what it's for. The portable, wireless printer looks great and works well but will cost more than its desk-bound, equally efficient counterpart.

· Think about the volume of pages you'll be producing. If you're writing books, for example, a laser printer will be a better workhorse than a bubblejet, in spite of the ticket price.

· Look at the price and durability of toner cartridges before buying the printer. Opting for the sub-£50 printer - and they do exist - can lead to disappointment when the replacement cartridges end up costing £17 a shot and you need four in the first year.

· Don't worry too much about dots per inch and resolutions. They're all impressive and even the most basic printer, given good quality paper, will make a letter look reasonable.